Steve Grove, CEO & Publisher of the StarTribune, brings a fresh perspective on the future of local journalism, drawing from his unique background at Google and as Minnesota's DEED Commissioner. We delve into how his diverse career equips him to modernize a storied newspaper and discuss why expanding coverage beyond the Twin Cities is essential for relevance in today's evolving media landscape. We also explore the potential of AI to strengthen user experiences. This episode is a must-listen for anyone passionate about the survival and evolution of local journalism in a digital world.
Steve Grove, CEO & Publisher of the StarTribune, brings a fresh perspective on the future of local journalism, drawing from his unique background at Google and as Minnesota's DEED Commissioner. We delve into how his diverse career equips him to modernize a storied newspaper and discuss why expanding coverage beyond the Twin Cities is essential for relevance in today's evolving media landscape. We also explore the potential of AI to strengthen user experiences. This episode is a must-listen for anyone passionate about the survival and evolution of local journalism in a digital world.
The Growing Destinations podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Learn more about Minnesota's third largest city, which is home to Mayo Clinic and features wonderful recreational and entertainment opportunities, by visiting experiencerochestermncom.
Steve Grove:If small papers across this state fail or can't make it in today's environment, that's not good for anybody. That's not good for our business, for our team or, most importantly, for Minnesotans. So we've been talking to a lot of small publishers across the state pretty regularly and asking the question how could the Star Tribune partner with you?
Bill Von Bank:Welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast, where we take a deep dive into destination development and focus on a wide range of topics, from from tourism and entertainment to economic development and entrepreneurism and much more. I'm your host, bill Vaughn-Bank. This year, star Tribune is celebrating 157 years in operation. That's a long time. My guest today is at the helm of this legacy media company at a time when local journalism is struggling and many community newspapers are folding. Steve Grove is the CEO and publisher of the Star Tribune and has been traveling around the state on listening tours. Today he's in Rochester, minnesota, and joins me for a conversation. Steve Grove, welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast. Thanks for having me, bill. Good to see you. Steve, can you share with us your background and career history that landed you as publisher of the Star Tribune?
Steve Grove:I do not come from the newspaper industry. I spent most of my career in technology at Google and YouTube. I did grow up in Minnesota, in Northfield, and went to college in California and then had a career in technology, like I mentioned, came back to Minnesota about six years ago with my wife, mary, and our twins. At the time they were about a year and a half old and we thought we'd take a shot at the Midwest. I'd grown up here, of course, mary was actually from California, but we thought, you know, minnesota could be a great place to raise our family.
Steve Grove:I left Google soon after, joined the state government and was the governor's deed commissioner for the last four years, during a pretty unique time in our state's history, and really loved that role and felt like it rooted me in a place.
Steve Grove:I really enjoyed doing something that was related to Minnesota, related to this community, and found a lot of purpose in that. When the Star Tribune reached out and said they were looking for a new leader at a unique time for this institution, it was not really on my radar but I was like gosh, this is a really important part of being in Minnesota having a great newspaper that can help our state stay informed and thrive. And, of course, journalism faces major challenges today, so our owner, glenn Taylor, and the board were looking for an outsider to come in and give some fresh eyes to it at a time when transitioning to digital is really the central theme of any institution like ours, and to get to take a 157-year-old icon of our state and try to bring it into a modern digital media company was a challenge that looked too exciting to pass up, and it's been a great ride this first year getting to begin our journey together.
Bill Von Bank:How have your experiences at Google and Indeed really helped or shaped your approach to leading a major news organization?
Steve Grove:You know, of course, at Google you grow up with digital in your blood. It's just how the place runs and you learn a lot about how an innovative culture is built, how to set goals, how to track those goals, how to think like a product person and put the user, your end user, at the center of your focus. I really grew up from a business perspective within that Google culture and learned so much, but oddly, I would say, I've brought as much from my time in government to this role as I did from Google, because indeed, the agency I had the honor of looking after, a big part of our charge was to navigate crisis during a really tough time for the state, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, with the murder of George Floyd and the civil unrest that followed. Our agency was on the hook, both to provide unemployment insurance and small business assistance during a challenging time, but also help rebuild some of those corridors that were hit.
Steve Grove:And that opportunity to navigate through a tumultuous period of time and to really change the culture of an agency that I think we all felt needed a reboot was a really extraordinary opportunity to have a chance at being a change leader, and I think at the Star Tribune you know, it's a different culture and a different time and a different business, but many of those same dynamics around facing a pretty challenging crisis in journalism and needing to change a culture that has been really wedded to print for so long at a time when digital is on the rise. I've drawn a lot of lessons from my time in government as well as tech in this role, and got to learn a lot more about this new business and this new media dynamic at a time when so much is changing so quick.
Bill Von Bank:The Star Tribune is investing in its journalism to better serve readers across Minnesota. Can you elaborate on the key areas where these investments are being made?
Steve Grove:Well, one of the things we realized early after doing a statewide tour is there's just a lot more to cover in Minnesota than we were currently covering in the Twin Cities, and so part of the reason we're here in Rochester today is we're like look, we can cover so much more of Minnesota and be a more Minnesota-based paper if we get out of the Twin Cities and start listening some more. So this is our second listening tour. We're learning a lot from community leaders, subscribers frankly, non-subscribers too, people that maybe gave up on us because they felt like we were too centric, too focused on the Twin Cities, and we've been asking ourselves some pretty basic questions what are the stories that aren't being told outside of the Metro? What are the stories that uniquely connect to Minnesota, to each other, no matter which part of the state you lived in, and how can our reporting add value to the community? How can we create opportunities to find solutions to your problems, to find connections between your communities and others, to understand what's happening around you?
Steve Grove:And I think fact-based, objective journalism is just a bedrock of running an effective society, and the Star Tribune can play that role, I think, for the state if we lean in. But we've got to be listening to our customers, we've got to be listening to our local leaders, and so part of our thesis is to grow. We're hiring reporters across the state. We just hired a new reporter here in Rochester last week. We've hired additional reporters in St Cloud, Moorhead, Bemidji, Duluth, Mankato. We think we have a shot at being a Minnesota institution as much as the Twin Cities one, and we need to earn that right. Of course, but we'll only get it right if we're out here listening.
Bill Von Bank:How do you see the role of local journalism evolving in the next years, especially in the context of the challenges the industry is facing?
Steve Grove:Well, it's interesting, when I talk to people about local journalism compared to, say, national journalism, they'll say, well, look, you know Fox news and MSNBC and the big national publications, they're all polarizing us. They're not? Uh, they're, they're not treating us like citizens, they're treating us like voters or political actors. Local news, I think, can uniquely bind people together because it's rooted in place in a way that I think feels much more connected to community, and our goal is to empower the growth of Minnesota's community and strengthen it through the people and stories and ideas that start to be inputs forward.
Steve Grove:I think that's a unique thing where local media can differentiate. I still think objective, fact-based journalism is a product people wanna buy. They don't wanna be sold or spun on things. We have an opinion page, sure, and we'll feature diverse voices there, but you need a common thread of what's truth in your community and I don't think that society has given up on that. I think, just with a lot of different sources of information on the internet today, you can get a lot of other types of content and we need to make sure news is the center of people's reading habits so they're getting quality journalism and good information.
Bill Von Bank:There was just an announcement just in the last month of a newspaper chain closing in the Twin Cities South Metro Twin Cities. That affects communities like Prior Lake and Shakopee and Savage and others. Do you feel like you have a bigger role now to help those communities with news reporting?
Steve Grove:We do. I mean, I don't think that the Star Tribune is trying to compete with so many other news organizations in Minnesota as we are collaborating with them, heat with so many other news organizations in Minnesota as we are collaborating with them. If small papers across the state fail or can't make it in today's environment, that's not good for anybody. That's not good for our business, for our team or, most importantly, for Minnesotans. So we've been talking to a lot of small publishers across the state pretty regularly and asking the question how could the Star Tribune partner with you? Do we bundle subscriptions in some way? Do we share content in some way? I think that a stronger Star Tribune will be more possible if local papers are also strong.
Steve Grove:That habit of relying on news in your community is so important. But it's a crisis. I mean just to put it into context for your listeners. In the last 10 years, we've lost two-thirds of the journalists in this state. It's stunning. There's 66% fewer journalists today than there were 10 years ago and a third fewer papers. So we're experiencing a true crisis in media right now and unless our state and our state's leaders and our state's media institutions step up and do something different, we're going to see that decline continue. So it's a moment, it's an inflection point. We've got to treat it with a lot of seriousness.
Bill Von Bank:How do you ensure that the quality of journalism remains high across all your coverage areas?
Steve Grove:Yes, Well, we have to hire great people. I mean it starts with hiring great reporters, reporters who know the communities they report in. When we went out to find a reporter here in Rochester, we weren't looking in Bemidji for that person, we were looking in the community, of course. So hiring great talent's important. Consistently training them on journalism and its evolutions is really critical too. I think that it starts also with listening. I mean, if you just sweep into a community, tell a story and then bounce, you haven't really gotten a sense of the essence of that community. So paying attention in listening sessions like today, where you're not after a story but just listening to the themes and the storylines in the room, are a really important way to get it right.
Bill Von Bank:What are you hearing in Rochester from the leaders and the people that you've been chatting with?
Steve Grove:Well, it's funny, when we did listening tour a year ago, the Rochester session was it could feel kind of a chip on the shoulder of the folks in the room. They're like, well, you know, you're this big Twin Cities newspaper, you're writing about Duluth and other communities far more than ours. This is like the medtech capital of the universe and you're underreporting it. Like what are you doing? You have a reporter here, but it's not enough just to have one reporter. So we listened to that and we said you know, you're right, we don't, we should hire more reporters in Rochester. And so we've done that and we're looking at ways to partner and grow that content too.
Steve Grove:I think Rochester just doesn't get enough credit statewide for being this extraordinary economic engine of the state. Everyone knows Mayo, of course, and that's a central component of it. But the DMC, the startup scene here, the medtech and biotech scene, there is a whole host of companies here that form a pretty unique ecosystem for not just Minnesota but for the country. That I think the whole state would benefit from if we elevated. And that's what we want to do in our storytelling here.
Bill Von Bank:Let's take a deeper look into the Star Tribune itself. You've brought some new leaders on, and how do these roles contribute to the strategic vision of the Star Tribune?
Steve Grove:Yeah, we're trying to rewire the place a bit. I mean, we're not going to change the fact that quality journalism matters, but we got to be thinking like a tech company. A lot of ways we talk internally about thinking having sort of the heads of product people in the hearts of journalists. The journalism shouldn't change in the sense that there's a craft to that, there's an objectivity. But we got to be thinking about ways to reach new audiences. So we've hired a new product director. His name is Aaron Pilhoffer. He's our chief product officer and he runs our whole product team. We've hired a new brand director on marketing to tell our story better. We've hired a new CFO. We've hired a new director of planning and innovation. We have a whole host of roles that just didn't exist at the company before, because we need to be a different company.
Steve Grove:This wasn't the kind of institution where you were going to come in and just tweak a few things on the edges and off to the races. We knew we needed to do a pretty fundamental reboot of how we structured things and, you know, I think it'll pay off. It takes time, but bringing in fresh eyes is important, and those fresh eyes can't only be mine. It has to be other leaders in the group too. So you know we want to give ourselves a fighting chance and I tell you we are unique compared to many of the regional papers. We've talked a lot about the challenges here. But look, the Star Tribune has survived and thrived with the largest newsroom of any news organization in the entire Midwest 210 journalists. Yes, that's down from where we were 20 years ago, but that's bigger than any newspaper in Chicago. It's large comparatively and honestly we owe a lot of that to our ownership.
Steve Grove:Glenn Taylor, your listeners may know, owns the Star Tribune in addition to the Timberwolves and Lynx and many, many other businesses. He is committed to this institution. He wants to see it grow. He wants to reinvest in it. That's a pretty fortunate thing for Minnesota. Most states do not have that. They have a private equity firm that owns a newspaper and they're trying to eke out every last dime and they're pulling on the profits for themselves. Glenn's never taken a penny from the Star Tribune. His commitment to growing it is really why I'm here, why we're lucky to have it, and my predecessor and other leaders have really done a great job to build a good foundation. But I tell you, every month that goes by, more is changing in the digital world than changed the year before. So the pace of change is so fast we've got to be looking ahead and be willing to take some risks and do some different things.
Bill Von Bank:Let's talk about the digital transition at the start to be owned, tell us your vision for your content management strategy and the whole marketing and the advertising platforms that you're really implementing.
Steve Grove:Yeah, I mean. Our vision is to be the leading model for local news in the country, driving innovation to make any Minnesotan's life better. That's a pretty bold goal when you think about the fact that there really hasn't been a regional or local paper that set the model that others copy. People talk about the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal as being these national models. No one's really quite landed that in local and our thought is why not Minnesota, why not us? We've got every reason to believe we can. I'd say at the core of it is a revamped digital presence. Later this year you'll see an entirely new web presence for us, new apps to download on your phone, a new content management system and a new subscription funnel that make subscribing to us much easier. We've got to think and run ourselves like a modern digital media company. That means investing in digital. It also means investing in content areas that we know people care about. What is unique about Minnesota locally that will attract a subscriber.
Steve Grove:So we have five new major areas of content we're honed in on. They're not shocking, maybe to your ears to hear, but they are unique to Minnesota in what we think is a winning proposition. One is sports. Two is news and politics, the third is food and culture, and then two that I think are a bit more unique to Minnesota. One is the outdoors, given the state's investment and belief in our natural resources, and the other is business. Of course, we're here in Rochester, the medtech capital of the world. We're, of course, in the Twin Cities. We have the highest rate of Fortune 500 companies per capita in the country. So these are things that we think differentiate us between other subscription offerings that are out there. We're hiring to fill those content areas and shifting reporters behind them, and we think it gives us a value proposition that's pretty distinct compared to other ways people can spend their hard-earned money.
Bill Von Bank:From an employee perspective. How do you get employee buy-in to this?
Steve Grove:new model. Yeah Well, I'll tell you, my most pleasant surprise when I arrived is people were ready for change. I don I don't think anybody at the Star Tribune thought, gee, we should just keep printing newspapers forever and there's digital, doesn't matter. There was a really a pent up desire for change. So that's been good.
Steve Grove:Of course, the devil's in the details and how you execute your plan for change is everything. I would say that there are those at the Star Tribune who are really, really excited about it. Others who maybe not, but I'd say, on the whole, the culture is really behind this and our employee surveys tell us that too. There's a lot of belief that we've got a plan that works, that the direction makes sense. We all know that nothing's assured and that we have to earn our right to be a new institution, but I tell you, my greatest pleasure in joining this company has been to see just the enormous talent in the building. It is a very purpose-driven company. People are there because they want to make a difference. They believe in journalism, they care about its impact on the community, and many of the folks working at Star Tribune could do far more lucrative things in their career than be journalists, but they really care about storytelling and the value journalism has to a society, and that's something that's really special and I don't take that for granted for a minute.
Bill Von Bank:We've already been speaking to some of your engagement and community involvement. You have created a new position, commentary and engagement director, to diversify voices. Tell us more about that.
Steve Grove:Opinion pages are a pretty unique spot. They're already, I would say, the most vibrant water cooler in the state. You get a lot of different opinions in that section but oftentimes we end up inviting just by the nature of who we are kind of the official perspectives right Professors and senators and governors and public officials, and that's great. We don't want to ever stop that. Those are important voices. But we think that having a community engagement director who's proactively going out into the community to find people who have perspectives that are, who's proactively going out into the community to find people who have perspectives that are maybe more diverse or unique on the perspective of political affiliation and focus on demography and the background that folks bring, also just geography, and getting a broader concept of greater Minnesota voices on our pages, you don't just get that by saying you want it. You have to go out and aggressively pursue those voices and across the state Across the state.
Steve Grove:We want to be a far more robust water cooler of Minnesota issues, beyond maybe the Twin Cities writers who we bring in today. So I think that opportunity to bring in new voices is an important value proposition for us. I think it's what Minnesota's want to hear too. Our pieces that have more diverse political perspectives in them and a broader reach across the state tend to do better. So we think it's meeting a customer need as well.
Steve Grove:We've talked a lot about the new approach to digital and its importance. Tell us about the importance of print for the Star Tribune. You do have still a big distribution. We will run a newspaper in print for as long as it makes sense for our customers, and right now it makes a ton of sense. There's a lot of revenue to be had there for us as a company and, more importantly, I think people who enjoy print appreciate the curation that goes behind it. I mean, in digital you're just clicking on links here or there. You're not seeing kind of what an editor says hey, these are the most important collection of stories on a given day. That's a powerful tool.
Steve Grove:So we're going to continue to invest in print. We've recently made some big changes there. We've brought back a more special sections that really highlight important moments in the state. Thematically, we've reshaped our entire obituary section in a really neat way around remembering those we've lost, and we've made some unique adjustments to our primary sections to give us some flexibility but also to give our readers a more diverse report. In the future. I don't think print everything that's in digital will be in print. Print will be more of a curated project from digital, given the abundance of the internet. But that shift should still provide, I think, a print product that's well worth the money and provide something that's unique to that medium. That is, I think, special for a physical product compared to a digital one.
Bill Von Bank:Give us your perspective on AI and does it have a role within the Star Tribune?
Steve Grove:Well, artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting and scary technology developments of the past few years and, of course, it's decades old. But with the advent of ChatGBT, I think there's just been this sea change of people understanding. Wow, this is truly magical in a lot of ways. Of course, it is just technology. It works for us, we don't work for it. We get to make choices as a society about how we use it.
Steve Grove:I think we need to be careful to ensure that AI doesn't take us down the rabbit holes everyone talks about when it comes to misinformation, but I think we also need to be experimental.
Steve Grove:We need to innovate. We need to use this in ways that can strengthen user experiences. Imagine if, when you came to the Star Tribune or a publication like ours and you asked a chatbot what you've missed since you were last on the site and instantly fed you the articles that you haven't seen yet. What if an AI-informed chatbot that is fueled by journalism, not just the broad sea of content on the internet, give you much more refined and specific answers that you could trust, because you knew it was pulling from, say, the Star Tribune's archives, for example? So we're experimenting. We're talking openly to all the major AI companies about ways we might partner. We're also cautious, for all the reasons you need to be, but this genie isn't going back in the bottle, in a sense, and how people get information is going to change rapidly and, as a provider of great quality information, we have to be using these tools both for public facing ways and also for our own internal systems if we're going to be a stronger news organization for Minnesota.
Bill Von Bank:You've been busy over the last year. Do you have something that just stands out that you're really proud of?
Steve Grove:I'm proud of the team really. I mean, it's a great group internally that has bought into a new vision and is working hard against it. One of the things that is unique when you're trying to change the way a newspaper is run is that you still have to produce the newspaper every day. We call it the daily miracle. There hasn't been a single day in the 157 year history of the startup boom where we have not managed to put a newspaper out, and so all these changes I'm talking about are happening while the team is also reporting the news and putting it out and finding advertisers to sponsor it and developing more subscriptions that we can grow with. So it's a unique time where we've called 2024 a year of building. It's just, it's a year of building. We're going to reintroduce the Star Tribune later this year. We're excited about that. We have some new value propositions to put forward, but you can't build and continue to have the Star Tribune run its daily course without incredibly dedicated people. So that's been. The real delight for me is just the team.
Bill Von Bank:What are your long-term goals for the Star Tribune and how do you plan to achieve them?
Steve Grove:Well, we need to grow subscriptions. I mean our core business shift has to be that we really hone in on digital subscription growth. We think we've got hundreds of thousands of more digital subscribers we can capture in the state, given the size that we're at. We think that, uniquely, minnesota is a bit of a bellwether nationally, but certainly in the Midwest is a state that really is distinguished in so many ways is worth watching for folks outside of our own borders. There's an opportunity for any organization like ours to be the voice of the Midwest, not simply Minnesota.
Steve Grove:But I think in the shorter term we really need to deliver a better statewide report. We want people to think of the Star Tribune as the Minnesota Star Tribune, a Minnesota institution, and I think that's something we're really bullish on. Broadly, I think if we get this right, you have a society in our state that feels connected to itself, that feels like it has a common set of facts to base its conversations on, that feels like life here has a certain consistency and openness and transparency to it, where we can trust each other and we can trust our media sources and, while we may disagree on a whole host of things, we at least know the common set of facts that we're operating from. That's the value of a great and robust news organization that serves the whole state, and I think that's what Minnesotans deserve. So we hope we get it right for the state, because we really do feel like we're stewards of this institution, and we're trying to get it right for everyone that subscribes to us.
Bill Von Bank:Steve Grove, this has been a fascinating conversation. I appreciate the insights and the outlook on the 157-year-old Star Tribune. Thanks for being our guest today on the Growing Destinations podcast. Thanks so much, Bill. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for tuning in to the Growing Destinations podcast and don't forget to subscribe. Thank you for tuning in to the Growing Destinations podcast and don't forget to subscribe. This podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Find out more about Rochester, Minnesota, and its growing arts and culture scene, its international culinary flavors and award-winning craft beer by visiting experiencerochestermncom.